Spokane teens get on board for angling

Tree pairs of ospreys, including this one, gave high school students a trout fishing lesson at West Medical Lake.richl@spokesman.com (Rich Landers)

The generosity of local anglers who share their sport goes beyond little kids – to the teenagers the little ones soon become.

On Wednesday, a group from the Spokane Walleye Club and other sportsmen’s clubs trailered eight boats to West Medical Lake to meet 21 students from Lewis and Clark High School’s outdoor learning class.

“We try to introduce them to a variety of outdoor experiences,” said their teacher, Paul Neff. The field trips often tap community experts in activities such as birdwatching at Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge and kayaking on the Little Spokane River.

“Most of these kids know very little about a lake, except what they’ve experienced on a (swimming) beach,” he said.

Local schools couldn’t expose a class to fishing without the help of sportsmen volunteers, who supply the rods, reels and bait as well as the boats and expertise.

Being out on a lake teaches you more than how to catch a fish.

Three pairs of ospreys were fishing West Medical along with the students. Everybody got to see the “fish hawks” dive into the water and come up around half the time or less with a fish in their talons.

In one two-minute flurry of action, three ospreys dove into the lake and plucked out trout within 100 feet of the boat seniors Alex Rice and Drew Castellaw were fishing.

“Something tells me we should go fishing over there,” said their boat driver, Jim Kujala.